Avaliação de algoritmos para conversão de modelos de velocidade de tempo para profundidade

Abstract

Even today, time migration is the imaging process substantially employed in the oil industry. Such popularity is due to its high degree of efficiency and robustness, and its ability to focus reflectors in various geological environments. However, in areas of high geological complexity, time migration fails so that depth migration and a depth velocity field are indispensable. This field is usually obtained through tomographic iterative processes starting from an initial velocity field. The conversion of velocity fields from time to depth is a quick way of obtaining a geologically more consistent initial velocity field for such processes. Some algorithms for time-to-depth conversion based on newly developed image-ray tracing are reviewed and an alternative algorithm based on propagation of the image-wavefront is proposed. The algorithms are applied to two-dimensional synthetic data and evaluated according to their efficiency and accuracy, highlighting their advantages, disadvantages and limitations in obtaining depth velocity fields.